Nigeria’s Q2 2026 data narrative: A triumph of reforms or just recovery?, By Uddin Ifeanyi

43 per cent by which the economy grew on an annualised basis in the second quarter of this year is far from the kind of high-productivity growth trajectory that the country needs.

Here, if you separated the beautiful parts of the growth narrative, especially telecommunications and information services from the rest, the picture you are left with is more of an economy recuperating across a broad front with a few highly dynamic modern sectors pulling the average up… Yet, the fact that the economy is no longer waiting for crude oil production to rescue aggregate output, does not mean that it has been transformed.

In the last twenty years, the economy has skittered between the low (about 2—3 per cent average annual growth rates) of the last decade, in which growth was too tepid to raise living standards, even as population growth pressures prevailed, and periods before that, when high oil prices and investment booms produced bursts of 6—7 per cent average annual growth rates.